The First iDisplacement
Between the imposing block of a concatenated Serbia-Egypt-Venice-Poland-Romania and the outpost of Brazil sinks a forgotten artificial pond. Dried up, only its geometric would-be estuaries and a rim of light blue paint suggest its intended purpose as a fountain. Weeds interrupt rounded stones of a gentle, covetable, clutch-able weight, together contained by a crisp overhang of pebbled concrete. In this bed of rock, five mobile devices were braced in furrows of displaced earth. Dimensions of the devices varied by make, model, and modification, and their angle of tilt depended on the relative counterbalance of their trusses.
Once photographed, the devices appear to punctuate the picture plane, black and depthless (or depthlessly infinite), geometries of flat obsidian. One horizontal iPhone proves an exception, establishing relationships—inversions, reflections—with a stone nestled against its face and an unassuming sprout of weed whose subdued blades burst, in its echoed iteration, across the upper half of the frame. In physical landscape mode and at just such a tilt, it suggests a drama of own found form: an introspective, yearning stone in a wasteland (protagonist) and the amorphous, invertebrate encroacher (threat?).
These juxtapositions of mirroring and absorption, of void and volume, of texture and expanse, of structuring and seeping, of the dry earth and the suggested wetness of glass, echo histories of the site: beyond the dried and forgotten fountain, to the Giardini’s origins as a landscaped solution—Napoleon’s—to the (less-celebrated) topographic inverse of Venice’s famed mirror-still canals, the piles of mud and rock dredged from the lagoon to make way.
The same black of the canal—the suggestive, inky interface of the canal—is contained in the black mirror, the mobile device.
Technological surface—illusionary prosthetic—severed from its person.
This post is part of a series that narrates nine iDisplacements implemented at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Follow the iDisplacements publication on Medium and/or the iDisplacements hashtag on Instagram to read and see the next instalments.
